14. Business Architectures for Niche-Market Enterprises

Much of the current focus of attention for business architecture has been on new startups or on existing large enterprises, but there is also a great deal that can be usefully learnt in applying the same principles to the needs of smaller niche-market businesses and organizations. This chapter describes a real-life case study with a small restaurant chain in Central America that wanted to expand outward into other cities in its region. The brief engagement covered a broad scope from high-level strategy all the way down to day-to-day operations, and, working with the principals of the business, delivered explicit action plans that gave detailed guidance for a broad range of themes such as business models, business alliances, marketing, advertising, building layout, workflows, performance metrics, recruitment, and training. The chapter ends with some lessons learned about what does and does not work in this type of business architecture engagement, what to do about these in further real-world practice, and some suggestions on how to apply these techniques in other forms of business architecture work.